How You Can Succeed In Guitar Teaching & Why Most Guitar Teachers Fail
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Anywhere you look, statistics about the success of most guitar teachers are sadly discouraging.
The majority of guitar teachers have few (if any) really great guitar students and for most, earning even $50,000 per year seems unrealistic.
Many become so frustrated, that they quit guitar teaching altogether and go to work at some non-musical day job, spreading the myth that “it’s hard to earn money with guitar teaching”.
Here is the reality:
“Guitar teachers” don’t fail - people fail.
Guitar teaching as a profession is (or can easily be) incredibly lucrative, stable and rewarding (you’ll see how in a moment).
After building my own 7-figure guitar teaching business, helping thousands of people become truly incredible guitarists and coaching many guitar teachers to earn multiple 6-figures per year, it is now proven that there is virtually unlimited potential for success in guitar teaching.
EMAIL TO GET ACCESS
By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
Guitar teachers don’t fail because it’s hard to become successful in this career field - they fail because their mindset drives them to failure.
Guitar teachers are notorious for having a very cynical outlook on life in general. It is this cynical mindset that makes it impossible to achieve big success with guitar teaching.
Before I show you why this mindset will destroy your guitar teaching career, take 3 minutes to assess your current success potential.
Complete this free assessment: “Will You Become A Successful Guitar Teacher?” before reading below.
Here are the top reasons why the mindset of most guitar teachers leads to predictable failure and how you can turn this around to become highly successful.
Guitar Teaching Failure Reason #1: A Cynical & Negative Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Most guitar teachers with a cynical mindset get in their own way and never even try to set or reach ambitious goals (such as earning $100,000 per year with guitar teaching or helping hundreds of people become great guitarists).
Deep in their minds they believe that such goals are unrealistic. This happens because:
- They don’t know anyone personally who has ever achieved this level of success with guitar teaching.
- They don’t believe that it’s possible for them personally to become successful as they teach guitar.
- They have been surrounded by cynical & negative people all their lives who told them things like: “You can’t earn a lot of money with guitar teaching” or worse, “you shouldn’t try to earn a lot of money in guitar teaching”.
This cynical mindset prevents most guitar teachers from ever doing anything that would lead to success and creates a vicious circle of negative beliefs that only guarantees failure when they try to teach guitar.
Fun story as an aside:
When I was in high school (long before I started to teach guitar), I had to take a statistics class.
And about the only ‘interesting’ thing I remember about it, was when my teacher asked us:
“If you flip a coin 99 times and it lands heads each time, what’s the chance of you getting tails on the 100th toss?”
And even I, who absolutely bombed that class, was in shock when a bunch of students shouted numbers like: 80, 90 or even 100% because you were “overdue for tails”, even though the answer is obviously: 50/50
And I bring this up because many guitar teachers think the same as my clueless classmates when talking about their odds to make big money teaching guitar.
Many say things like:
“I’ve struggled to get even ‘15’ students on my own... to teach guitar & get to 6-figures, I need at least 50 more students. Ain’t no way
I’m getting that!”
And (even if I close my eyes at their numbers likely being WAY off) each time I hear stuff like this, I’m like:
Uhm... and just WHY not exactly?
Assuming you have at least 50,000 people within a 10-mile radius of you, you have more than enough potential guitar players to have 100 (and likely - way more) students as you teach guitar.
And just like coin tosses...
The likelihood of you signing up the next student you talk to has NOTHING to do with how many students you ‘already’ have.
I mean, is this not obvious-as-heck when I put it like that?
Besides...
It’s not only not supposed to get ‘harder’ to attract students with each new student you get...
... it ought to get WAY EASIER.
Because ‘unlike’ coin tosses, you ought to be getting better at running your business, doing your marketing, sales, teaching and retaining students as you teach guitar.
Which means, your schedule ought to be filling up FASTER.
(Ok, sure, at ‘some’ point you may exhaust - what marketers call - your “total addressable market”.
But if you only have 10-30 students so far and you ‘don’t’ live in a cornfield, you’ve got a loooooong way to go before you’re at that point.)
Something worth thinking about.
Guitar Teaching Failure Reason #2: The Blame Game
Guitar teachers who struggle to become successful are quick to blame others for their failure.
Here are some of the most common things guitar teachers say when they can’t find enough guitar students:
Attract More New Guitar StudentsFind out how to become effective
at attracting new guitar students.
Improve Your Guitar Teaching BizDiscover how to make your guitar teaching business more successful.
Earn Good Money Teaching GuitarLearn 11 steps you should take to earn more money teaching guitar.
- “I live in a very small town - there aren't enough guitar students here to teach guitar.”
- “I live in a huge city with millions of people - there is too much competition for new guitar students, so I don’t think I’ll become successful if I teach guitar here.”
- “Most potential guitar students don’t have money to spend where I live.”
- “The economy is bad – people don’t want to spend their money on lessons. So, no point in trying to teach guitar right now”
- “It’s summer time - it’s no use to even advertise my guitar lessons during these months, since all potential guitar students are on vacation.”
- “I don’t have the same impressive musical credentials as my competitors - that’s why I am not getting any guitar students.”
Fact is, all these so-called reasons are nothing more than BS excuses.
The very best, most successful guitar teachers are able to consistently attract guitar students all year around, in any country in the world, with or without impressive music degrees.
(I know this, because I’ve trained almost all of them.)
When it comes to your guitar teaching credentials, there is only one that really matters - the training that you have (or don’t have) on how to teach guitar.
Fortunately, this credential is one you can easily get at any time and it doesn't require you to invest tens of thousands of dollars and 4 or more years of your life (like a traditional music degree does).
More importantly, getting guitar teacher training will show you how to easily overcome all the challenges and problems you currently consider impossible to solve in your guitar teaching + easily fill your schedule with guitar students.
The most successful guitar teachers become successful because they invest in guitar teacher training, while most other teachers do not.
Guitar Teaching Failure Reason #3: Self-Sabotage (For You And For Your Guitar Students)
A cynical mindset does much more damage than merely prevent your guitar teaching efforts from making money in obvious ways (such as not being able to get more guitar students).
To make things worse, the guitar students you do manage to acquire will almost never become great guitar players.
Why? 2 reasons:
- They will sense your own lack of belief and conviction in what you are doing and will not take guitar lessons with you (or their own practicing) seriously. Your own cynical attitude inadvertently turns your guitar students into cynics about their own musical potential.
- Because you are not “all in” (100% committed) towards becoming the most successful guitar teacher you can possibly be, you will not take the actions needed to learn how to teach your guitar students in the most effective ways possible.
As a result, your reputation will spread throughout your local area and serious guitar students (the ones with real money to spend on lessons and who are totally committed to becoming the best musicians possible) will never study with you.
In the end - everyone loses (and you lose the most).
How To Overcome Guitar Teaching Cynicism:
1. Join A Success-Focused Guitar Teaching Mastermind Group: This refers to a group of guitar teachers who are either highly successful already or are well on their way to earning 6-figures per year with guitar teaching.
Note: Almost all public guitar teaching forums you find online are full of cynics and unsuccessful teachers who are barely getting by financially - avoid them!
Instead, seek out guitar teachers who truly are champions in their local areas and who have proved all the naysayers (who told them “you can’t make money when you teach guitar”) wrong.
Top success coach Tony Robbins has stated: “People’s lives are a direct reflection of the expectations of their peer group.” This couldn’t be truer for guitar teachers.
While the cynics can only drag you down by telling you about their own failures, truly successful guitar teaching experts pull you up and help you to become wildly successful too.
2. Follow A Proven Guitar Teaching Model: After you take action to surround yourself with the most successful guitar teachers and develop a champion mindset, you must do what they did: acquire a blueprint for your guitar teaching success.
This refers to the training, tools, strategies and support systems to build your highly successful guitar teaching business.
When you have this, nothing can stop you from becoming the #1 guitar teacher in your area… except yourself.
Warning: To get the maximum benefit from these action steps, you MUST first purge all traces of cynicism from your mind and get on the same mental wavelength with the world’s top guitar teachers. To do this, take this guitar teaching assessment: Will You Become A Successful Guitar Teacher? and get free feedback from me on your progress towards becoming a successful guitar teacher.
Learn how to become the #1 guitar teaching business in your local area - get the very best guitar teacher training.
